Chapter 19
The dream was vivid and slow and warm.
Mara was lying on a beach she didn't recognize, the sand hot beneath her back, the sun pressing down on her bare skin with a weight that was liquid and golden.
The ocean was close. She could hear it, the rhythmic pull and retreat of the waves, and the sound matched a rhythm happening lower, between her legs, a mouth moving against her with a patience and focus that made her body arch off the sand.
She moaned. The sound was distant, muffled, belonging to someone asleep.
The mouth between her legs was relentless and knowing, tongue tracing patterns she recognized, patterns her body had learned to respond to over the past week, and the pleasure was building in slow, concentric waves that radiated outward from her center through her thighs and her stomach and the backs of her knees.
The beach dissolved. The sand became sheets. The sun became the grey pre-dawn light filtering through her bedroom curtains. The ocean became the sound of her own breathing, ragged and shallow, and the mouth between her legs was real.
Mara surfaced from sleep with a gasp — not from novelty anymore, but from Lex's mouth being exactly as skilled as she'd come to expect.
Her bedroom materialized around her in pieces: the ceiling fan turning slowly overhead, the framed coaching certifications on the wall, the nightstand with her reading glasses and the glass of water she'd set there before bed. Her own house. Phoenix Ridge.
And between her thighs, Lex's dark head moving with deliberate, unhurried focus.
Mara's hand found Lex's hair by instinct, fingers sliding into the thick waves, gripping without conscious thought.
Lex made a low, approving sound against her and the vibration traveled through Mara's nerve endings like a current.
The boundary between sleep and waking was still blurred, her mind foggy and her body sharp, every sensation amplified by the dreamlike transition from unconscious to conscious pleasure.
"Lex." Her voice was hoarse with sleep.
Lex didn't lift her head. Her tongue pressed flat, then circled, then pressed again, the rhythm steady and knowing. One hand was braced against Mara's inner thigh, holding her open. The other traveled lower, fingers tracing along slick skin, and then one finger pressed inside her and curled.
Mara's breath stopped.
The pressure was deep and focused. Lex's finger curved and pressed and the combination of her mouth on Mara's clit and the fullness inside her was overwhelming. Mara's hips bucked and a sound came out of her mouth that was raw and desperate.
"Is this okay?" Lex murmured against her.
"Yes." The word was barely audible. "Don't stop."
Lex didn't stop. Her tongue kept its rhythm and her finger worked in slow, curling strokes, and the dual sensation built fast and enormous, converging somewhere deep in her pelvis. The pleasure spoke directly to her body in a language older than thought.
Then Lex's hand shifted. Her slick finger traced lower, past where it had been, and pressed gently against Mara's ass.
Mara's whole body went rigid. "Lex—"
"Trust me." The words were warm against her clit. "Stay with me."
The pressure was slow and careful and nothing Mara had experienced before. Lex's finger eased inside and Mara's mouth fell open and no sound came out. The fullness was different from anything she knew. Deeper, more intimate.
A place no one had touched, and the vulnerability of it, the newness, sent a shockwave through her nervous system that rewired every sensation happening simultaneously.
Lex's tongue on her clit. Lex's finger in this new, shocking place.
The twin points of pleasure converging into something so intense Mara's vision blurred and her thoughts dissolved into white static.
"Oh God." Her voice didn't sound like hers. "Oh God, Lex."
Her hands twisted in the sheets. Her back arched off the mattress.
The ceiling fan turned above her, lazy and indifferent, and from the corner Goldie snored softly, and outside the window a mockingbird was singing its first notes of the morning, and all of it was backdrop to the overwhelming thing happening between her legs.
Her toes curled against Lex's shoulders and her thighs trembled and the orgasm hit her with a force that ripped a cry from her throat and left her shaking, her entire body seized, her vision white, her hands fisted in the sheets so hard the fitted corner pulled free from the mattress.
It went on longer than usual. Wave after wave, her body clenching and releasing, the aftershocks rolling through her in diminishing but relentless pulses.
Lex's mouth went gentle through the last tremors, easing her down with soft, slow strokes until the trembling subsided and Mara was left boneless and gasping against the pillows, her body humming with a satisfaction so complete it bordered on stupor.
Lex crawled up the bed and lay beside her, propping herself on one elbow.
She was naked, her dark hair mussed and tangled, her mouth wet, her brown eyes warm with satisfaction and tenderness.
The expression she wore only in private, only in these moments, when the cockiness and the bravado stripped away and what remained was the real Lex, the one who held Mara while she cried and whispered reassurances into her hair and looked at her like she was the most important thing in the world.
"You looked irresistible sleeping," Lex said. Her fingers drew slow circles on Mara's stomach. "I had to taste you."
Mara pressed her hand over her face. She was smiling and trembling and her heart was hammering and she was forty-eight years old lying in her own bed at five thirty in the morning with a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had just woken her up with her mouth and done things to her body that Mara hadn't known she wanted. The absurdity of it. The glory of it.
"You're going to kill me," Mara said.
"What a way to go."
Lex's arm wrapped around Mara's waist and pulled her close, and they lay tangled together in the grey morning light while Goldie slept on her dog bed in the corner, undisturbed.
From the window, Mara could hear the first birds of the morning and the distant sound of the ocean, the same two-note rhythm that had scored every morning of her life in Phoenix Ridge.
The house smelled like coffee from the automatic timer and the salt air that crept through the old window frames and the warm scent of Lex's skin that had become as familiar to Mara as her own.
Mara turned in Lex's arms and faced her. She studied the strong jaw, the dark lashes, the small scar on her knuckle, the tattoo of the compass rose that peeked above the edge of the sheet. Every detail was becoming memorized. Catalogued. Precious.
"Does anyone know?" Mara asked. "On the team?"
Lex's fingers continued their patterns on Mara's hip. "No one knows. But I think Elise suspects."
"How much does she suspect?" Mara's fingers stilled on Lex's collarbone.
"Enough that she stopped asking where I go at night and started leaving the hotel room door unlocked."
Mara's stomach tightened. The warmth of the bed, the afterglow of the orgasm, the golden safety of lying naked with Lex receded slightly as the professional part of her brain woke up and began running its calculations.
Elise suspecting meant the locker room might suspect.
The locker room suspecting meant it would reach ownership.
Ownership meant Astoria. Astoria meant scandal.
Scandal meant the end of everything Mara had rebuilt over years of careful, disciplined, wall-building work.
"We have to be more careful," Mara said.
"Or we could stop being careful."
Mara's stomach clenched. She knew that tone.
She had heard it in team meetings when Lex was about to push back on a drill she thought was pointless, in press conferences when a reporter asked a question she thought was stupid.
The tone of someone who had decided to say the hard thing and was not going to be talked out of it.
Lex shifted onto her side, her dark eyes finding Mara's with an intensity that made the bedroom feel smaller.
"I want to be open about this, Mara. I don't want to sneak around and pretend you're just my coach during the day and then come to your bed at night like it's shameful.
I hate leaving before dawn. I hate not being able to touch you at the rink.
I hate the way you flinch every time someone walks past your office when I'm inside. "
"I don't flinch." Mara pulled the sheet higher, a reflex as automatic as the denial.
"You flinch. Every time." Lex's hand stilled on Mara's hip. "I understand why. I respect your reasons. But I want more than stolen hours and locked doors, and I think you want more too."
"What I want doesn't change the reality of what we are.
" Mara heard her own voice go flat, professional, the coaching voice she used when a player was pushing past a boundary.
She hated it. She hated using it with Lex, in her bed, with the sheets still warm from sex.
"I'm your coach, Lex. The power dynamic alone would end my career. "
"You're the woman I'm falling in love with."
The silence that followed was enormous. Mara felt the impact radiate through her chest, through her ribs, through the tender, terrified center of her heart that had been bracing for this moment since Boston.
She had known it was coming. She had seen it building in the way Lex looked at her when they were alone, the shift from desire to devotion, from wanting to needing.
She had seen it in the locker room after the game, in the way Lex held her against the equipment lockers and laughed with her face pressed against Mara's hair, in how her arms tightened as if she was afraid Mara might disappear if she let go.